Leifu Chang, Ph.D.
Leifu Chang received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Tsinghua University in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Sen-Fang Sui. He then joined David Barford’s laboratory at the Institute of Cancer Research in London and later moved with the group to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. There, he studied the structure and regulation of the anaphase-promoting complex/cyclosome (APC/C), a molecular machine that controls protein degradation during cell division. He joined Purdue University in January 2018 and is now a Professor of Biological Sciences. His research combines cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), biochemical reconstitution, and functional assays to uncover how macromolecular complexes work. His laboratory studies the structures and mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas systems and other RNA-guided systems, including CRISPR-associated transposons (CASTs) and RNA-guided transcription regulation systems.